Malwarebytes Chameleon can remove malware from an already-infected PC

If malware somehow manages to penetrate your PCs defenses then it’s easy to assume you’ll simply download some other antivirus tool to remove it. But life may not be so straightforward. Once installed, some malware will try to prevent you from reaching big antivirus sites, and downloading or running their tools, making the problem much more difficult to tackle.

The program is essentially just a collection of tiny portable tools, each of which aims to do the same thing: download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, install it, launch the program and kill any known malicious processes. And it does all of this automatically, with no problems, no folder selections, no license agreements or anything else, making Chameleon extremely easy to use.

But the key element here is that each of these tiny tools has a disguised name, in the hope that it’ll be much more difficult for any installed malware to intercept.

Malwarebytes understands that a virus is most unlikely to block your browser, for instance, because it wants you to run your system as normal for as long as possible. And so they’ve included executables called “firefox.exe”, “firefox.scr” and “iexplore.exe”; double-click one of these and with any luck it should run, download and install Anti-Malware.

And there are several other files which use a similar approach. Chameleon includes "Rundll32.exe" and "Svchost.exe", for instance, which are key Windows components; again, malware won’t block these by name as it’ll cripple your PC, so if "firefox.exe" and "iexplore.exe" don’t work then try these instead.

Plainly this isn’t a perfect scheme, because a virus could be written specifically to block Chameleon. It would just have to look beyond the executable name to check the program’s folder, say, or the file size. In which case you’ll probably need to use another PC to download bootable environment such as Avira’s AntiVir Rescue System, which will then allow you to properly disinfect the system.

Most malware doesn’t do this, though, and so for the moment Malwarebytes Chameleon provides a quick, easy and extremely convenient way to try and disinfect any PC.